Pain is Inevitable, Suffering is Optional
by Madison Dyann
Summary: Alyssa MacKenzie is just a normal sixteen year old girl living in a small town in Kansas. Well she was until the bombs hit.
1. Prologue

Alyssa slowly took hold of the newly rusting door handle. She turned it, but used her foot to open it. While the front door opened, Alyssa shifted the gun so that she was holding it with two hands. She kept her finger on the trigger. She waited a few minutes before she walked over the threshold and into the house. She looked around the front room, the gun pointing to where ever Alyssa looked. After making sure no one was in the room, she finally took in her surrounding.

The room, which was once a living room, was dusty and a moldy smell filled the air. A decent looking couch faced a rather large television set. A floor lamp standing in the corner across form the wooden coffee table. There were numerous pictures hanging on the wall. Alyssa avoided looking as them. Gun still raised, she made her way threw the rest of the small house. Once she concluded that there was no one in the house she lowered her gun, and set her backpack on the dust couch.

Alyssa MacKenzie was a young girl of sixteen. Her hair, which was once healthy and shiny, was now dry and tangled due to the lack of decent care. Alyssa had her long black hair tied up in a very messy bun. Her lips were chapped and her tan skin was rough. She wore jeans that were becoming thin in the knee and they hung loose on her now skinny fame. Her jeans were tucked into a pair of work boots. In each boot Alyssa had a hunting knife. Her pale green shirt was covered in dirt and smelled like sweat. The thin brown jacket she had over it also need to be washed.

First, Alyssa went into the kitchen and began to search threw the out-dated cabinets. Upon opening one, a disgusting smell filled her nostrils. Alyssa turned her her quickly and cough. Then trying not to breath she turned back to the cabinet. She grabbed every canned item and boxed food that didn't mold growing on the outside. She put the food into a box she found under the sink. She then grabbed all the knives that were present in the draws.

Alyssa moved through out the house take whatever she needed or may need in the future. When she was done she had a small amount of medicine, some canned food, blankets from the bedrooms, and a .9 caliber handgun she found under the mattress. She then loaded it into the back of her '75 Ford truck. Alyssa then went back to the house and shut the front door. She pulled out a can of spray paint from her bag. She sprayed the purple paint onto the door handle. She hopped in her truck and drove off.


	2. The Beginning of the End

The date was August 8, 2006. A Saturday. Alyssa had just gotten home from volleyball practice. This year her team, the Ransom Raiders, had a good chance of winning sectional, which was something they hadn't done since 1975. Alyssa was a liberos, the one who usually receives an attack or serve. She played on Ransom's varsity volleyball team since freshman year. But girls who played volleyball at Ransom had, the school was to small to have a junior varsity team. Alyssa loved volleyball even though she wasn't particularly good at it. Softball was more her sport. She originally took up volleyball just as something to do during the fall in freshman year. But her coach, Laura Burke, helped her come to enjoy it. Laura wasn't a real serious coach, she was more like a player, seeing as she was just 28.

Alyssa and her family, which included her parents and their five year old Border Collie named Toby, lived on a small farm on the outskirts of Ransom, Kansas. Her family had lived on the farm for more than one hundred years. Her family had lived in Ransom for about a hundred and fifty years. The farm had earned the name the MacKenzie Plantation. The name was very misleading because the MacKenzie never had slaves, in fact they were abolitionist. The farm set on about 230 acres. Some of it they farmed, mostly corn, but the majority of it was pasture for their numerous animals , which included some horses, but mostly cows. The house itself was a typical farmhouse. It was a large white two storied home with a large wrap around porch and a green gabled roof. While the outside looked like how it had when I was built, expect with a new coat of paint, the inside had been updated and remodeled.

But her mother didn't want the house to lose it's "farm" feel. So in the kitchen, she replaced the dark maple cabinets with light maple cabinets. She used the original hardware for the kitchen, she just painted them a copper color. She replaced all the floors in the house with oak floors. The living had a large open stoned fireplace. The fireplace hadn't been used in years, not since Alyssa's parents had heating and air conditioning put in the eighties. Alyssa's bedroom was the most untraditional room in the whole house.

Her room was located on the second floor and over looked the backyard. It was some what larger that the average bedroom. The walls were a golden color and they matched blankets on her full sized bed. The furniture, which included side tables, a desk and a bookshelf, were a dark wooded color. But while the furniture appeared to fit the country look, everything else did not. Alyssa had a few posters in picture frames hung up on the wall. One was a movie poster for Star Wars Episode 4. Another one was one of Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. The other posters were of musicals, like Hairspray and Moulin Rouge. The last poster was one of David Bowie. Beside Alyssa's bed hung a cork board with many newspaper clippings and pictures. Some of the headlines read like "Raiders Stomp Eagles". The pictures were pictures of Alyssa and her friends or teammates. At the foot of her bed, there was Toby's dog was Alyssa present on her tenth birthday. Now he was about six years old.

It was around two in the afternoon when it happened. Alyssa was sitting in the backyard, playing with Toby. Her father, Martin, was just coming back from feeding the horses. It was Toby who saw it first. Toby just started barking. Alyssa and her looked up to where Toby was barking, which was west. It took Alyssa a moment to compend what she was looking at. It was a orange cloud in the shape of a mushroom. It looked to be coming from Denver.


	3. Death

Alyssa searched a few more houses on that street, taking what ever she may need. Medicine, dinnerware, dog food for Toby. She also gathered all the clothing out of the houses. She then hopped in her truck and drove home. The town of Ransom, Kansas was once a small farming town. A great place to rise a family. But know the town was deserted. Alyssa was the only person left. Everyone else, the ones who had survived, moved on with the refugee camp. They were head to Cheyenne, Wyoming. But Alyssa refused to leave the town she had spent her whole life in.

It's been almost a month since the bombs went off and about three weeks since the people of Ransom left. The first week after the bombs had been the worst week of Alyssa's life. She had lost both her parents, all of her friends and everything she had worked towards now seemed pointless to her.

Her mother went first. It wasn't that much of a surprise. Her had been diagnose with beast cancer about nine months earlier. She had been dying for a long time. Alyssa was just happy that she went quietly, unlike her father.

Three days after Alyssa and her father had buried her mother, her father was shoot and killed by a member of the mercenary group called Ravenwood. They claimed he was obstructing government process. Alyssa never discovered the true story, she was there when they shot him. She was at home sleeping, like she had been since her mother died. Ravenwood never told her why they had shot her father. They just said he was disrupting government business and they left her to bury the death of her father was the main reason she refuse to leave with Ravenwood to go to the refugee camp. She didn't trust them.

*A/N*- Sorry it's so short.*


End file.
